By timothy from Slashdot's networked-games-obvious-choice department:ragnvaldr writes "I'm the 'IT guy' for an office of about a dozen people. And when I say IT guy, I mean I'm the only one here who can use google well enough to figure out how to make things work. We have a 500GB Mac server with a Drobo with 6TB of storage attached. So far all this server does is back up data, and I want to make it a little more useful. We also have a Filemaker server on it, which I have yet to learn how to use at all, let alone efficiently. Any suggestions to make this machine a little more useful?"

By timothy from Slashdot's there-is-a-season-churn-churn-churn department:FatLittleMonkey writes "You've all seen the footage of Galloping Gertie, the infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge. This is due to a type of turbulence called Wake Galloping, caused by airflow creating lift on the lee-side of cylinders (or cables on suspension bridges.) Now researchers in South Korea have developed a way of harnessing the turbulence to generate electricity. Their device works most efficiently at wind speeds too low for conventional wind turbines."

By timothy from Slashdot's you-scratcha-my-back department:An anonymous reader writes "Infoweek is reporting that Microsoft has obtained the exclusive right to match any buyout offers for Nvidia. The obscure pact was uncovered in SEC documents, and apparently stems from Microsoft's licensing of Nvidia chips for the Xbox. But its real value now lies in the fact that Nvidia has become a major player in tablet chips, including chips for Windows 8 slates."

By timothy from Slashdot's quasi-funded-mandate department:1sockchuck writes "Despite the recent outbreak of powerful tornadoes, the Social Security Administration has decided to engineer its new data center to withstand winds of just 90 miles per hour. Data center experts say mission-critical facilities should be built to withstand winds of 120 to 180 miles per hour to protect against tornado and hurricane risks. It's the latest in a series of challenges for the $800 million project, which will replace a creaky 30-year old facility."

By Soulskill from Slashdot's temperature-in-hell-starting-to-drop department:uslinux.net writes "Gearbox Software released the demo for Duke Nukem Forever today, though it's only available to preorders and other promotions for the time being. After more than a decade, it looks like this game will actually hit stores this month. After 12 years in development, will it live up to the hype?"Included with the linked article is DNF's launch trailer. This should go without saying, but just in case: NSFW. Seriously.

By Soulskill from Slashdot's internet-memes department:Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers have developed a computer algorithm that can rank images based on memorability. They found that in general, images with people in them are the most memorable, followed by images of human-scale space — such as the produce aisle of a grocery store — and close-ups of objects. Least memorable are natural landscapes. Researchers built a collection of about 10,000 images of all kinds for the study — interior-design photos, nature scenes, streetscapes and others, and human subjects who participated through Amazon's Mechanical Turk program were told to indicate, by pressing a key on their keyboard, when an image appeared that they had already seen. The researchers then used machine-learning techniques to create a computational model that analyzed the images and their memorability as rated by humans by analyzing various statistics — such as color, or the distribution of edges — and correlated them with the image's memorability. 'There has been a lot of work in trying to understand what makes an image interesting, or appealing, or what makes people like a particular image,' says Alexei Efros at Carnegie Mellon University. 'What [the MIT researchers] did was basically approach the problem from a very scientific point of view and say that one thing we can measure is memorability.' Researchers believe the algorithm may be useful (PDF) to graphic designers, photo editors, or anyone trying to decide which of their vacation photos to post on Facebook."

By Soulskill from Slashdot's syrias-problem department:CWmike writes "In what appears to be the latest bid by a government to throttle access to news and information amid growing civil unrest, the Syrian government Friday shut down all Internet services. Internet monitoring firm Renesys reported that starting around 7 a.m. EDT today, close to two-thirds of all Syrian networks were suddenly unreachable from the global Internet. In just 30 minutes, routes to 40 of 59 Syrian networks were withdrawn from the global routing table, Reneys' chief technology officer James Cowie said in a blog post. The shutdown has affected all of SyriaTel's 3G mobile data networks as well as several of the country's ISPs, such as Sawa, INET and Runnet. Also down are the Damascus city government page and the customs web site. The only networks that appear to be somewhat reachable are a handful of government-owned networks such as one belonging to Syria's Oil Ministry, Cowie noted. 'We don't know yet how the outage was coordinated, or what specific regions or cities may be affected more than others,' Cowie wrote. 'If Egypt and Libya are any guide, one might conclude that events on the street in Syria are reaching a tipping point.'"

By Soulskill from Slashdot's in-other-news-netbooks-still-exist department:An anonymous reader writes "Asus has announced that three Eee PCs will ship with Ubuntu Linux. Three 2011 models — the 1001PXD, 1011PX, and 1015PX — are immediately available, though no retailers seem to stock them yet. A Canonical exec had this to say about the new netbooks: 'There are a number of factors that make Ubuntu an attractive proposition for ASUS and its customers. Ubuntu continues to set the standard for slick design, ease of use and security, it is the world's third most popular operating system, and [it] has the most number of users in Linux. We [Canonical] were looking at publicly available data on the operating systems accessing Wikipedia last week and found the web site serves more pages to Ubuntu PCs than to iPads — there are a lot of users out there.' It might not be the same as Asus launching three flagship netbooks all running Ubuntu instead of Windows, but it's definitely a start. Asus says there are more Ubuntu netbooks to come later this year, too — hopefully they'll run Ubuntu 11.04."

By Soulskill from Slashdot's must-be-bored-of-sony department:Several readers have sent word that Anonymous has hacked servers belonging to Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, making off with over 10,000 emails."The Ministry’s website is still down as of this writing, and the servers are under Anonymous control. ... The email archive includes approvals and rejections for a variety of visas and passports, among other requests and correspondence. 'It’s near the election’s anniversary. We had to do something,' said one of the Iranian members of Anonymous from #OpIran. He said they take down Iranian government servers on a regular basis for operation days, but that obviously retrieving information required a different approach to the group’s signature DDoS attack. He also indicated an as-yet unannounced attack. 'For the election’s anniversary, we have a complete DDoS attack day' planned, he said.

By Soulskill from Slashdot's caving-to-peer-pressure department:pbahra writes "A bill that would allow Spain's authorities to close down illegal websites with limited judicial oversight has caused anger among the country's Internet users. The law, known as Sinde's bill (after the current culture minister Ángeles González-Sinde) is designed to close the loophole that sharing sites such as Roja Directa have exploited. If you go to the website today, you will find a pithy warning against Internet piracy, courtesy of the US authorities. The US has exerted considerable pressure on Spain over what it sees as Madrid's failure to tackle Internet piracy. A banner with the seals of the US Department of Justice, plus two other bureaucracies, informs Internet users that the Spanish domain name, formerly a hub of illegal sports content, has been seized in accordance with US copyright law. But if you do a search, it takes very little to realize that Roja Directa is alive and kicking."

By Soulskill from Slashdot's taxing-their-resources department:coondoggie writes "The number of tax-related identity theft incidents is exploding, and nowhere is that more obvious than at the Internal Revenue Service, which has seen reports rise from 51,702 in 2008 to 248,357 in 2010. While it has programs in place to fight the identity theft issue, it is also hamstrung in many other areas, according to a report out this week (PDF) from the Government Accountability Office. For example, the GAO says the IRS's ability to address identity theft issues is constrained by privacy laws that limit IRS' ability to share identity theft information with other agencies."

By samzenpus from Slashdot's now-you're-cooking department:The British Intelligence agency has unveiled its latest weapon in the war on terror, cupcake recipes published by the Ellen DeGeneres show. MI6 hacked an online al-Queda magazine replacing instructions about how to &ldquo;Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom" with a web page of recipes for &ldquo;The Best Cupcakes in America&rdquo; from Ellen's show. From the article: "It included a recipe for the Mojito Cupcake &ndash; 'made of white rum cake and draped in vanilla buttercream'- and the Rocky Road Cupcake &ndash; 'warning: sugar rush ahead!' By contrast, the original magazine featured a recipe showing how to make a lethal pipe bomb using sugar, match heads and a miniature lightbulb, attached to a timer."

By Soulskill from Slashdot's slowly-but-surly department:rfc1394 writes with this snippet from an Infoworld report:"Internet Explorer's market share continues to drop like a rock. Net Applications published its numbers for May, and Internet Explorer's total share declined yet again, from 55.11 percent in April to 54.27 percent in May, a drop of [0.84 percent] in one month. Contrast that with Google's Chrome, which rose from 11.94 percent in April to 12.52 percent in May, an increase of [0.58 percent]. In the past year, IE's share of browser usage has dipped from 60.32 percent to 54.27 percent. How long before IE usage drops below 50%?'"

By Soulskill from Slashdot's tea-earl-grey-hot department:splitenz writes "Sophisticated voice commands will be the next big step for the development of smartphones, according to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. 'We have gotten down to such tiny devices with amazing computers inside with all the human senses; vision, hearing, touch, location acceleration and movement. I don't want to click buttons anymore and I just want to do things without having to think about which buttons to click.' He was speaking at the Australian Chamber Business Congress. Wozniak also sees a continuing place for touchpads."

By Soulskill from Slashdot's how-many-gigaquads-does-it-hold department:An anonymous reader writes"A UC San Diego team is about to demonstrate a solid state storage device that it says provides performance thousands of times faster than a conventional hard drive and up to seven times faster than current state-of-the-art solid-state drives. The drive uses first-of-its-kind phase-change memory, which stores data in the crystal structure of a metal alloy called a chalcogenide. To store data, the PCM chips switch the alloy between a crystalline and amorphous state based on the application of heat through an electrical current. To read the data, the chips use a smaller current to determine which state the chalcogenide is in."

By samzenpus from Slashdot's brand-loyalty department:aquabat writes "According to Shanghai Daily, a boy from the Anhui Province desperately wanted to buy Apple's flagship tablet but didn't have enough cash. Rather than waiting to save up the money for the Apple product when it invariably gets marked down, the lad decided to sell one of his kidneys for 22,000 yuan (roughly $3,400) so he could afford one. But, surprisingly, the scenario in which the organ was harvested wasn't in the best of conditions, and the boy isn't feeling very well."